From across a room and at first glance, one of these pictures could be mistaken for a surveillance image, taken from miles above, coding a remote, complex landscape in brilliant colours. The colours seem to map out a vast territory, distinguishing and clarifying this wild landscape only to a trained observer. But as you move closer, the image seems to be subtly in motion, in one moment expanding outward, in another, reversing and compressing into the background.

Now you notice that the image is composed of vivid patches of coloured paint, crowding each other, overlapping and entangled. For this is no earthly landscape. These constellations of colour are the subject, endlessly creating, and recreating themselves over the surface of the canvas.

This kinetic energy is contagious. It's hard to stand still gazing at this picture. The coloured forms radiate outward, responding to changing light and proximity, coming forward, as if curiously regarding the viewer. Then, either a change in light, or the viewer's point of view will cause those colours to recede, as another patch of colours emerges.

The viewer finds himself moving in, stepping back, shuffling back and forth with the moving colours. Haufschild's painting technique is revealing. His process of applying paint has this quality of emergence and recession that we feel when standing in front of the work. Applying paint thickly, with a spatula, he will build the colour gradually, sometimes working wet in wet, sometimes waiting for the paints to. Thus he reaches often 20 to 40 layers. If he realizes he's gone too far, he may grind the paint down, and start again from a lower layer, rebuilding the colour.

Haufschild says that during this process, he alternates between elation and frustration, delighting in the formation of the picture, then losing the thread of this dialogue with colour, then struggling to find it again.

Thus, while Haufschild initiates the creation of the picture, the picture soon takes over and he relinquishes complete control of the emerging image, receptive to its needs, learning when to let it be. The resulting picture possesses a kind of radiant colour we associate with art glass and independence, having a life of its own. You wonder what it's doing when you're not in the room.